in the most recent issue of Women’s Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2022.2130314
- Could you tell us about the inspirations of this book?
My coeditor and I were up late after a conference some years ago, and over wine we discovered that we both had read Coolidge’s letters to Mayer in the archive, and thought they were utterly fantastic and needed to be published. - What is something you learned in the process of writing this article?
I learned how limiting poetic coterie can be, while simultaneously how creatively nourishing friendship can be. Mayer and Coolidge both felt themselves to often be on the edges of their artistic circles, and they kept returning to their friendship with each other to sustain and support their work. Sometimes I talk with my students about finding your “ideal reader”: they were each other’s.
- What made you interested in studying this subject?
Reading Mayer’s Midwinter Day for the first time was a pivotal moment in my life. It’s a book-length poem written on a single day, and I remember spectral winter light throwing wide open my sense of poetic possibility. It’s astonishing; go read it!
“Shiny Collisions: Editing as Serious Humor in dodgems” – an article in the new issue of Women’s Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2022.2130314
- Could you tell us about the inspirations of this article?
I had interviewed Eileen Myles about their magazine dodgems in 2014, so when the opportunity to write about dodgemsin a scholarly context arose, I was thrilled to use some of the great material from the interview.
- What is something you learned in the process of writing this article?
I had previously had an unsubstantiated hunch that, in editing — choosing and arranging pieces on the page — editors were often making statements about their social circles. However, this hunch was based on my own experience as an editor. In examining dodgems, I became convinced of its truth, and of how you could gently poke fun at your peers while still generously promoting their work.
- What made you interested in studying this subject?
For over a decade, I’ve been interviewing women involved in small press publishing, trying to record their stories.
- What are your next projects?
Hopefully, the collection of interviews — one of which inspired this article — will become a book! I am also finishing up Dating the Poem, a manuscript about the calendar date in poetry, and am drafting a hybrid creative work called Ephemerality Lab.
Biography
Stephanie Anderson is the author of three books of poems, most recently If You Love Error So Love Zero, and the co-editor of All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (University of New Mexico Press). Her latest scholarly work appears in Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory,Women’s Studies, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of American Literature and founding editor of Projective Industries. She is currently co-leading a multilingual project on writing stories for children through the Third Space Lab and a project on women editors/publishers through Doc Lab.
